


Croquis

by iokheaira



Category: Captain America (2011), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Art School, Bucky is a hound dog, Gen, Nudity, artistic vision, but no sexiness (almost), drawing the female nude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-19
Updated: 2012-06-19
Packaged: 2017-11-08 03:29:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/438643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iokheaira/pseuds/iokheaira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers is an art student and naked women are a part of the job description. (Bucky misses the point of the excercise.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Croquis

**Author's Note:**

> So this is basically a challenge: show what happens when Steve Rogers, the art student, first goes to a nude drawing class. Courtesy of putting this bee in my bonnet goes to abbieprime...

Steve's the first one in class.

He looks around the room, picks a spot at the front row where he's guaranteed a good view and sets up the easel. He isn't sure if this is a good decision, but he tells himself this is important and he can't afford to be chicken.

_"Hey, what's that course? 'Drawing the female nude?' You lucky dog, you," Bucky says. "Think you can get me the name and address of one of those models? One with a good rack and nice pins?" He knows Steve won't do it, but he can't resist teasing._

_He elbows Bucky. "No, they're decent women and you gotta treat them with respect."_

_Bucky grins. "Fine, fine - who am I to judge if you want to waste the opportunity of a lifetime?"_

The other students slowly arrive, chattering about this and that and setting up. Steve has everything already in place, but he fiddles nervously with his box of charcoal and tries to list all of the times when he's seen naked women, or pictures at least. This can't be any stranger than that.

_When he is 12, he sees Mrs. O'Connelly feeding her youngest. He's seen women nursing babies before, but now he notices how she's rolled up her sleeves and her arms are bare, tanned and strong, holding the baby whose cheek looks as white and soft and round as her breast. He turns and goes away quickly before she notices him, not completely sure why._

_When he is 13, Bucky smuggles in a magazine with photographs of naked women. They're all young and beautiful with the hard edges smoothed out, so unlike the women he knows with their winter-chapped lips and bitten fingernails, hands roughened by washing dishes and laundry and wrinkles in the corners of the eyes and sweat beading on folds of their neck or bony elbows sticking out from the short sleeves of a summer dress. The skin of the women in the pictures is the grey and grainy color of a cheaply printed photo, or tinted an incredible pink. He traces the curve of a waist with his finger and wonders if the parts of real women he can't see are as different from the photos as the parts he can. The magazine makes rounds until Father Dooley finds it, and delivers a scathing sermon the next Sunday on the evils of self-pollution._

_When he is 14, he walks past the window of Annie McDonald and looks up, catching a glimpse of a bare back and raised arms in lamplight before her nightgown falls in place. He doesn't tell Bucky._

_When he gets to art school (Janey Reilly hitches up her skirt to fix her garter, a mermaid in a circus only wears seashells and a tail and falls shrieking and laughing into the water, there are women with rounded arms and bare ankles and shoulders and cropped tops on the beach and deep necklines), he looks through the library with its large, heavy books with reproductions of classics in black and white and sometimes in glorious color. Venus smiles mysteriously at him, coyly protecting her modesty; courtesans lie languid and careless and bare on plush couches. They are all beautiful and he still can't tell the difference between real and painted._

The teacher strides in, and explains their assignment. Steve tries to concentrate - he likes charcoal because it's liberating and immediate, but good paper costs money and he is already calculating mentally how many sheets he will need and if he can spare any for extra sketches from memory, later.

Then the model walks in; she's barefoot and wearing a bathrobe that's seen better days. The teacher drones on. He may introduce her or he may not; Steve can't focus on anything except the woman, who walks up on the raised platform in the middle of the room, takes off the bathrobe and drops it on the steps, and takes up a pose in the middle of the platform.

She's neither old nor young; her dark hair is gathered in a loose bun at her neck, wisps of hair already escaping. Steve forces himself to look down, at the curves and dips of her bare skin, all the places normally covered by clothing now open, no longer secret. Her breasts are large and pendulous; there are horizontal marks on the soft round expanse of her stomach and her hips and buttocks are not just one single smooth curve but several smaller ones, rolling and bumping against each other. He looks back at her face: she's looking in the middle distance, wearing a pleasant and absent expression. She's working.

Steve takes up his charcoal and starts to sketch.

_"C'mon, buddy," Bucky whines. "Least you can do is let me look at 'em, since you've had the whole show."_

_He sighs, pointedly. "I'm telling ya, it was not a show. But all right, you can take a look if you'll stop your moaning."_

_Bucky leafs through the sketches. "Whoa, the broad sure has nice tits," he says, appreciatively._

The model turns and lies down in a recumbent pose. Steve sees how the light changes to shadow here; there, the border between air and flesh translates into a line on paper. A human being, dissolving into forms that are less geometric and more organic, leaving behind a shadow of charcoal.

_"You know what, Steve?" Bucky says quietly, holding a sketch showing the outlines of a woman's back, curving as if she's bowed to draw off her socks or wash or pick up a fallen hairpin. Steve thinks it's the best; there's still something wrong about the arm reaching out where he didn't get the proportions right and the shading hasn't come out the way he wanted, but there's something pleasing about the curve of her spine and the set of her shoulders._

_"What?"_

_"I've never seen a dame completely naked in broad daylight. Kind of funny, ain't it? That I've had a woman but haven't seen one, and you've seen one but haven't had one."_

_Steve smiles. "Guess I'm still backwards, what else is new?"_

The teacher calls the time. The model drops off her pose and retrieves her bathrobe. She's undisturbed by the students' gaze as much as they ignore hers; she neither hurries nor lingers when she pulls the robe back on and leaves, her head and hands and ankles and bare feet now the only things of the body that can be seen.

Naked and clothed, she is real.

Naked and clothed, she is beautiful.


End file.
